


Reflections

by Fionavar



Category: Dungeons & Dragons (Roleplaying Game)
Genre: Gen, Poetry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-17
Updated: 2018-08-17
Packaged: 2019-06-28 05:46:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 564
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15701040
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fionavar/pseuds/Fionavar
Summary: A poem for each member of the Alternative Ethics party.





	Reflections

**Author's Note:**

  * For [onemooncircles](https://archiveofourown.org/users/onemooncircles/gifts), [Dakoyone](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dakoyone/gifts), [bettydice](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=bettydice), [codenamecynic](https://archiveofourown.org/users/codenamecynic/gifts).



**Katy**

Words lift from pages, and curl  
into stories, bright unrealities of meaning  
that colour the walls of a locked room.  
She cries for lovers lost, for heroes  
with inspiration on their dying lips  
\- it’s sweeter than screaming for herself.

 Magic thunders wild through her blood, forces  
her heartbeat to its unpatterned tides  
bursts through her skin to have its will.  
She learns to temper its chaos, to direct  
unmastered fire against her prison door.  
The stars shiver in her laughter, with her joy.

 She goes in search of stories’ truth, and to taste  
all the colours and freedom of the world.  
She finds a richness of details untold: the blisters  
rubbed raw, the disappointments, that hearts  
can break and still beat true, that handsome men  
may be mysterious rescuers after all.

**Shay**

The colour’s beaten from her world, the scars  
a fence against the raging and the power  
of her heart. It’s safer so, she’s told, and she bows  
her head into their black-smoke chains.  
They shape her with pain, fill her with death  
after death, measuring its guises and final secrets.

Obedience is the lash against her back, discipline  
the stark line drawn between slave, animal,  
subject, and observer. Survivor. She’s worthless  
otherwise, disposable as others she remembers. Never  
again, she vows, and learns to close, to deaden  
and dust-choke dry the tears and lifeblood.

 She follows the wizard across the world, guards  
the raw and tender fears that mirror hers. They know  
what they were made to be. The others reach  
out, a softer echo in their questions, a breath  
of freer air. It’s sweetly strange, the shared illusion  
of a distant horizon uncaged by bones.

**Harper**

He flees before the hunting storm, its winds  
a roar of roughened laughter in his sails. Waves  
call his name in a lover’s voice, and memories  
churn the surface, seethe in crushing depths.  
He could break himself on rocks and reefs. A sailor  
lives between these careless powers, finds his way.

Restless seas are safer than calm. Still water reflects  
too much, strands him motionless, alone  
with mirrored pain. He blurs and dulls the edges  
with smokescreen defences, distractions: flashfire  
quips and white-toothed smiles, the low burn  
of alcohol, the slide of flesh in the hungry dark.

Debts of unwise choices claw his spine. They’ll fall  
due: he knows he’s not enough to pay. Never  
stops him laughing at the twisting of his life, but now  
he has a guide. As sailors have always needed stars  
he navigates his course by her light heart,  
and loves her, as stars have always needed sailors.

**Khem**

At the spurred and desperate centre of her soul  
she burns in fierce synonyms: knowledge is power; pride,  
survival; fear is ambition; question, wound; and answers  
untrustworthy. Her guide through straits of fact  
is ambiguity dream-shaped. She could break her mind  
against the paradox, if she chose.

 She knows the fire of her forging, the flaws  
molten and hammered, crushed, the brittle  
breaking points left behind. They’re guarded  
by chosen truths and silent barricades, walls  
which obscure. The beam of her searchlight focus  
blazes, blinding her to treasures freely offered.

 She walks in changing ways, with phantoms  
of her dreams embodied, their subtle bindings.  
A volcano’s indrawn breath trembles  
beneath her feet. The storm waits: her word  
calls down lightning, and annihilation follows  
for her, or others on her path.


End file.
